The other day my friend Mary from Illinois wrote me with an autumn thought. “Have you noticed how much more colorful and beautiful the changing leaves on the trees are when it is gloomy. Somehow they seem to stand out much more beautifully.”

She has a point. It’s also interesting how the falling leaves cover the sidewalks and gutters, forming a colorful carpet that glistens all the more on a rainy day. So as to test Mary’s thesis, I got out the old cheap-o camera and got a picture of some poor soul in the rain amidst the falling leaves. The golden carpet of autumn does indeed seem to stand out in the gloom. But hey, you be the judge of that.

HEY COS: A woman at work who sits in the next cubicle from me recently went to see Bill Cosby speak at an urban church. As you might know, Mr. Cosby has been saying some blunt and controversial things lately about the need for African-Americans, especially young urban men, to pull up their own bootstraps. The woman in question also happens to be African-American and grew up in a low-income urban neighborhood, so her reactions were of much interest to me. I am grateful for her trust in sharing her impressions and opinions with an old white guy like me.

Ms. G (I’m tempted to say “Miss G”, following that quaint but charming Southern custom of addressing respected women as “miss” even when they are married) said that in her opinion, Cosby is on the money and is doing the right thing. She will be the first to tell you that there’s still plenty of anti-black racism out there on the part of whites (and maybe other ethnic groups too). But despite that, she sees a lot of black females from the inner-city (like herself) who have struggled to achieve a decent life and a responsible career, and expect their children to do even better. Like Cos, Ms. G believes that most every black individual today can overcome residual racist attitudes with enough work and willpower. But for whatever reason, too many young black men do not properly apply themselves, and thus become trapped in a world of gangs and crime and jail. Both Mr. Cosby and Ms. G feel that although our white dominated society still owes these men something, they’re long overdue for a wake-up call from within their own social community. As Ms. G says, “let’s keep it real”.

I take my hat off to Bill Cosby for what he’s doing. He’s taking some real risks and drawing some fire from black leaders who are probably afraid that a “pull your own bootstraps” message plays into the modern Republican agenda. I’ll be the first to agree that Cosby and his peers have to keep pitching for continued government assistance for the inner city. But there is a real problem regarding young black men in urban areas who leave the trajectory of education / career / family responsibility and follow a variety of meandering paths involving temporary jobs, crime, substance abuse, gang involvement, homeless shelters and jail time.

I’ve read a few research studies by well-intentioned academians who examine some Census statistics and crime surveys and employment reports and then conclude that the idea of the drifting, lawless urban black male is just a stereotype made up by bigoted Republicans. But Cos lived there and Ms. G still lives there, and they will tell you that it ain’t just a stereotype. I’ve driven the streets of inner-city areas on weekday mornings and early afternoons, and I too can tell you that there are way too many young men out there who should be in school or at work. And I can name more than one social worker who will tell you that you’ve got to get through to 8 and 10 year old boys, or else another generation will be lost (that’s exactly the way they put it).

I’ll readily admit that the starting end of the job ladder these days is like the proverbial “s*** end of the stick”. Back in my grandparent’s time, there were unions that gave factory workers some dignity and maybe even livable wages. Today, there aren’t any unions at most fast-food restaurants and health care institutions, so the low-end jobs there are generally unpleasant and low-paying. But I see a lot of immigrants taking those crummy jobs. They seem to know that you’ve gotta start somewhere to get somewhere.

I hope that Mr. Cosby’s message will bolster the attitude that already exists in the inner city neighborhoods among community pillars like Ms. G, that they will not quietly tolerate young men who drop out of school and assume an “alternate life track”. If the community backbone makes it clear that it disapproves of the “alternate life” (and there are a lot of good, hard-working, positive people living in the “ghettos” who form that backbone – that’s something that many white liberals and researchers fail to appreciate), then change is possible. Peer pressure is a very powerful thing. Let’s just hope that the pressure from Cosby and his supporters keeps up even when the alternate crowd accuses them of being Uncle Toms and Oreos, i.e. white inside. (Ironically, hip-hop artists love to exploit this line, even though they almost never live in the ‘hoods they chant of.)

THE LUMBERING PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES: I’ve been watching the Bush-Kerry debates (and the Cheney-Edwards sideshow), trying to figure out what they’re all about. One thing for sure: they’re not about truth and accuracy. Mister Cheney couldn’t even cite the right website for factual verity; he told people to go to www.factcheck.com, when in fact he wanted www.factcheck.org. And then it turned out that factcheck.org disagreed with Cheney on the issue regarding Haliburton and Iraq, the exact point he was disputing with Mr. Edwards when citing the factcheck site. Not that Kerry and Edwards don’t mangle the truth either. If you check out factcheck.org, they will give you a long list of Democratic Party sins too.

We still have another debate to go, but thus far the most memorable moment (for me) was the lumber thing on Friday night. To recap, Mister Bush was criticizing Mister Kerry’s plan to raise taxes for people making more than $200,000 per year, saying that it would hurt small businesses. Kerry responded by saying that Bush relied upon a convoluted tax code definition of “small business”, and thus wasn’t referring to real small businesses. To nail down the point, Kerry cited Mister Bush himself, who qualifies under our tax law as a small business subject to personal tax rates, given that he received $84 from his investment in a lumber company in 2001. Bush then gave Kerry a dramatic and humorous response, denying any involvement on his part in lumber; he hoped to show America that Kerry doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. “Want some wood?”

It would have been a master stroke, a crushing blow against Kerry, had the facts been on Mister Bush’s side. But for better or for worse, they weren’t. Within a few minutes after the debate closed on Friday night, the factcheck.org site explained the nature of Bush’s interest in a foresting venture formed in 2003 by Bush’s business trust and an investment partner, and backed it up with a document filed with the IRS. (Yes, Mr. Kerry got the years mixed up; the $84 in 2001 wasn’t from lumber, but it did in fact make Bush a “small business” for tax purposes).

I suppose that the Democrats will make hay out of Mr. Bush’s confident and totally inaccurate response about his own financial affairs. This is obviously good material for a negative ad (which we won’t get to see here in New Jersey since Kerry and Bush hardly spend any advertising money in the “locked in” states; our nation really should re-think the whole rationale behind the Electoral College system). But those ads probably won’t be show-stoppers. Most people can forgive the President for not immediately remembering everything that his personal business manager is doing while he’s in the White House running the country. Bush is a rich hombre, and the lumber venture came to only about $250,000 (with Mister Bush’s trust assumedly putting up half). What’s a piddling $125,000 to a rich guy who has the world on his shoulders?

However, there is an interesting angle to the “want some wood” incident. If you do a Google or Yahoo or AllTheWeb on “Bush” and “lumber”, you will find the usual partisan blogs hashing out the pros and cons regarding their candidate’s performance. But you will also see references to another issue, one of those hidden little things that can actually affect your life. Those references regard Mr. Bush’s 2002 implementation of protective tariffs against Canadian lumber. The federal bureaucracy in charge of foreign trade decided that Canada was unfairly subsidizing their foresting and lumber industry (not that we don’t help ours), and decided to impose taxes to protect American lumber corporations from low-priced Canadian wood that could bankrupt American companies like Weyerhaeuser and Boise Cascade and Louisiana-Pacific, at which point the Canadians would jack their prices way up. Those evil Canadians — hmm, aren’t they also trying to sell us prescription drugs at low prices, with Mister Bush again protecting America from such chicanery?

Anyway, if you check out the various web sites that discuss the 2002 Canadian lumber tariff, you will realize that American consumers are bearing the brunt of higher wood prices. You weekend handymen (and handywomen) who frequent the Home Depot know darn well just how expensive lumber has become over the past few years. And anyone buying a new house or fixing up the old one will feel the pinch too. But don’t worry, the American lumber investors are doing just fine because of that.

Hmm, in 2002, George W. Bush imposed lumber tariffs that protect American lumber investors. Then in 2003, he becomes an American lumber investor (via his business trust). Yea, there’s always a story behind the story, isn’t there.

But just to be fair, let me admit – there are real jobs at stake out in Oregon and Washington state because of lumber prices. The world is terribly complex, despite the efforts of politicians to make it seem simple. I myself think the government has to help workers who are displaced by economic changes and international trade, such as all the manufacturing jobs that were lost out in Ohio and Michigan, and now all the computer programmer jobs in New Jersey and California that went overseas. The federal government can help to retrain displaced workers and relocate them to other areas where help is needed. And yes, maybe give them some “welfare” until they get back on their feet. But in the end, you can’t stop progress. If India can program computers and Canada can provide wood cheaper than we can, well — we gotta go with the flow, and gotta keep on looking to put our workers into the things that America can do better.

REVIEW DAY: First, a web site review. A few days ago, I said that people in modern day America often have interesting and unexpected mixtures of tastes and interests. Eclectic times, these are. When you look at a personal web site, including my own, you often see this. The home page has all kinds of buttons and links about all kinds of topics that hardly have anything in common . . . except that the owner of the site likes all of them.

Here’s a good case in point. The site belongs to a fellow named Ron Turner. It’s at www.connect.net/ron. It’s a nice enough site, tastefully done. But Ron’s topics are truly an eclectic blend. They include: philosophy; the X-Files; Gershwin; Allen Ginsberg; jazz music from the 1930s; the Dallas Mavericks; Ansel Adams; Gino Vanelli; the Bossa Nova; Les Paul guitars; and other curious and sundry things.

“The time has come, the Walrus said, to speak of many things …” And that’s indeed what Ron and a whole lot of other personal web site people do. And the world is a more interesting place for it!

Next, a book review. The book of the day is Steven Johnson’s “Emergence”. I give it a moderate thumbs down. Johnson is undoubtedly a smart dude and a hip writer, and he says a lot of interesting things about the “the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software”. But he doesn’t really do much to forward your understanding of the overall “complexity” movement in science and computing. For that, you still need one of the basic texts, like Waldrop’s “Complexity” or Holland’s “Hidden Order”. I got to the last chapter of Emergence wondering when the insights were going to start flowing. Unfortunately, they never did.

Oh, Johnson proffers a lot of observations which seem at first like insight. But as with night mushrooms, they wither in the mid-day sun. His biggest topic of interest regards self-organization and the Internet. He admits that it’s hard for the average person to see any trends towards a more organic functionality emerging on the web, but for an out-there guy like him, the new day is coming into view. The book was written in 2001, and cites a number of web sites and site networking mechanisms (like Alexa) as heralds of the “within five years” future. Unfortunately, more than three of those five years have passed, and the great web emergence and convergence that Johnson prophesied seems nowhere in sight (or site!).

For example, Johnson cites the rating system on www.slashdot.com (a commentary board on techie stuff), which allows viewers to vote on the quality of each posting and to filter out materials that get low average ratings. I checked out slashdot recently and the voting and filtering system was still there, although you had to search hard for the buttons that allowed you to use it. I decided not to filter anything; I thus reviewed posts with ratings that ranged from –1 (very poor) to + 5 (very good). To be honest, some of the most interesting stuff got ratings of 1 or 2, and the stuff that came in at 4 or 5 was often quite bland. Perhaps user feedback is also a recipe for mediocrity. You almost feel embarrassed reading Johnson’s predictions, as though you were watching an apocalyptic preacher yelling about the coming of the end of the world, telling you that he sees the fire on high and hears the approaching tidal waves, that the moment is about to arrive, so stand up and be ready for the rapture … and nothing happens. The birds just go on singing.

Johnson makes some interesting points about feedback and how it helps foster (or prevent) the self-organization mechanisms that allow independent geese to fly in V patterns and leaderless ants to maintain a colony and hapless car drivers to contribute to a traffic jam (and also how “districts” emerge in cities without planning, e.g. the restaurant district or the diamond district or the used machinery district – I recall walking down some street in lower Manhattan and being amazed at all the old drill presses in the windows). His example of how press stories like Bill Clinton’s dabblings with Gennifer Flowers (if you recall the pre-Monica era) now emerge beyond the control of big media bosses is certainly useful. But overall, his book is a quick and pleasant read that seems substantial but ultimately leaves you hungry – as though you had just eaten out in that classic example of urban emergence, Chinatown.

Great is the matter of life and death;
Impermanence surrounds us!
Be Awake, each moment!
Do not waste your life!

Morning Gatha of Admonishment

SOCIAL ENGINEERING: I did a web search on the term “social engineering” the other day. Back in the late 19th and early 20th Century, SOCIAL ENGINEERING was the concept that intelligent planning and centralized controls could be used to change society into a kinder and gentler thing, where people could lead better lives. Social Engineering was once seen as the antidote to Hobbe’s notion that life is “nasty, brutish and short”.

Obviously, social engineering didn’t do too well in the 20th Century. And in the 21st Century, it’s turned into something else entirely! I just found out today that “social engineering” is now a method of overcoming an organization’s security methods by exploiting people’s tendencies to help other people. Classic hackers try to get valuable information (like credit card and social security numbers) through high-tech methods of infiltrating computer systems and overcoming their defenses. But the “social engineers” take a low-tech, high-psychology approach. They talk to employees and ask innocent questions. If the employee seems cooperative, they push it to the limit, eeking out enough info to get inside the door (where they can get some more info, on and on until they’re ready to do some real damage).

Supposedly, a “social hacker” managed to get $10 million from a bank this way. On his first call to the bank’s office, he got just enough information to impress the person who answered his next call. By the fourth or fifth call, he had all the codes needed to make a wire transfer. He was able to zap the money to a Swiss bank account in his name and then turn the funds into diamonds, which he brought back into the U.S.A. hidden in a belt. He got this far because humans tend to err on the side of helpfulness and trust. Well, you can be sure that the corporate security people and the homeland security folk are going to shut that down!

But back to good old-fashioned social engineering, the “change-the-world” kind. That’s now got a bad name too. The conservative types like to use it for target practice. I was reading a blog the other day (www.chronwatch.com, Dec. 6, 2003) that spoke of the evils of classic social engineering and the goodness of lassiez faire. The blogger, who claims to know a mistaken interpretation of Christian charity when he sees it, was chiding a public housing agency in Cleveland for spending taxpayer money to modify a subsidized apartment so that an 800 pound woman who needed a cheap apartment could get in and out. Obviously, wider doorways had to be cut out, and who knows what kind of bathroom appliances were needed. This guy implies that the lady could only blame herself for getting that fat; by bowing to her needs, society will only encourage such gluttony in others. (He’s also against spending public money to save near-extinct species like pandas; hey, if they can’t adapt to a polluted world, who needs em?)

OK — so, by that logic, the next time an SUV flips over on the freeway and someone gets hurt, let’s not waste any social resources like ambulances and hospital care on the driver and his guests. They darn well knew (or should have known) that SUVs have a stability problem. When people make mistakes, they should be held strictly to the consequences, even if that means death. Anything less than such a high standard will impede the adaptation and natural selection process that the blogger is so in love with. Although he doesn’t say it, he seems to anticipate the emergence of a perfect, flawless human race. Yes, it does sound a bit Hegelian, and vaguely Nazi.

In a way, though, isn’t this “incentive system” a la Ayn Rand a form of reverse social engineering? Weren’t the Nazi’s the ultimate social engineers … at least in the old-fashioned sense of social engineering. And perhaps the modern form, with it’s emphasis on unchecked self-interest and exploitation of old-fashioned civility, isn’t all that different. What goes around comes around.

I’d suggest that the conservatives start worrying more about the modern form of social engineering than about the costs of saving pandas and helping overweight humans.

PAINT CAN BLUES (antique white, actually): You know what’s really a drag? When you start getting older and one day you have to go out and buy something or do something that you haven’t done in quite a while. You remember there were certain stores or places to go where you could get what you need. But those places are either gone, or they don’t have the stuff any longer. There’s a whole different procedure for getting what you want, and you’ve got to learn how to do it all over again.

This has happened to me over and over since I passed the age of 30 (which was quite a while ago). My latest crisis involves interior paint. I rent an apartment, and painting the walls is pretty much the landlord’s thing. But there are a couple of dings and old nail holes that I wanted to touch up myself, so I went to Sears looking for a small can of antique white interior latex semi-gloss. Last time I bought paint was maybe 15 years ago, when things were basically the same as when I was a kid. You went to Sears or Two Guys or some other rough-and-ready kind of place, and you wandered around through rows and rows of paint cans, looking at the labels for the shade of color nearest to what you had in mind. This morning I went out to get a small can of antique white, figuring things would be just the same as they always were in the paint department.

Sorry, Jimbo, think again. The world has changed. I burned up a few gallons of non-replaceable petroleum fuel driving to Home Depot, K-Mart, Sears and Target (which doesn’t carry paint at all), and was appalled by the lack of variety regarding paint. About all one could find was bright white (not the antique white that I needed), and primer. What the heck? Where were all the different tones of blue and brown and green and red of my youth? I gave up and went home, confused and dejected.

Only later did it strike me. You now have to buy the primer and ask someone to mix in the color tints right there in the store. Oh, so that’s what that big counter in the Home Depot paint section is for. I thought that kind of thing was only for people with specialized tastes like sea foam or apricot. But no, even if you want good old forest green or fire-engine red or antique white, you’ve got to ask to get it mixed. OK, that’s the system now. Why didn’t anyone tell me about this change? Why wasn’t this in the newspapers?

OK, I’ll get with the new paint program. But what still bothers me is that there are a gazillion stores out there that make it incredibly easy to buy clothes and towels and books and CDs and camcorders and DVD players and premium chocolate. And of course the web sites only add to the mix. For stuff like this, you have lots of variety, with plenty of choices as to price and quality. But if you need a new table lamp, or a set of tires, or a small can of touch-up paint, or a new watch band, or wool mittens, or a sofa cover, or a bicycle tire pump, or a needle and thread, or you want to get some new heels on a perfectly good pair of shoes … for that kind of stuff, better days have passed.

It seems to me that over the past 25 years, the skin-deep stuff like clothes and towels and electronic toys have taken over the stores, while the basic stuff like tools and repair / replacement items have gotten harder and harder to find and to buy. Maybe this reflects the throw-away mentality that we have in America these days. You don’t get new heels on shoes, you just get new shoes. You don’t replace a watch band, just get a new watch. You don’t re-paint an old cabinet, just throw it out. When your shirt rips, don’t sew it, just throw it.

I don’t know. A lot of things have gotten better since I was a kid, and maybe the new way of buying paint is actually better; it arguably gives you more choices as to colors (although I’d rather just grab my antique white and pay for it, and not wait for the mixing guy to get around to me). Admittedly, places like the Home Depot and Staples make it easier to get a lot of nuts-and-bolts stuff that you’d have trouble finding when I was young. But still, the overall trend towards fashion and throw-away convenience in our American marketplace makes me wonder about our values and our inner fortitude. Right now there are some very tough people in places like Indonesia and Afghanistan and Tunisia and Yemen with designs on our rich land. Will people sipping lattes from Starbucks, wearing Polo knits and shorts they just got from Kohls, be ready for them?